Joel Edgerton To Buddy Up With Johnny Depp In Black Mass

After going toe-to-toe with Leonardo DiCaprio is Baz Luhrmann's The Great Gatsby, which just hit theaters this past weekend, Joel Edgerton is now getting set to team up with Johnny Depp.

Deadline says that the Australian actor is now attached to co-star with the Pirates of the Caribbean A-lister in Black Mass, the upcoming gangster biopic from director Barry Levinson. The site says that Edgerton will be playing the role of John Connolly, an FBI agent who also happened to be a childhood friend of Bulger's. It's suggested that it was because of Connolly's help that Bulger, a crime lord in Boston, Massachusetts, was able to evade capture and disappear off the grid.

Depp will star as the kingpin and has the project scheduled to start production once he has completed work on Academy Award winner Wally Pfister's sci-fi directorial debut Transcendence. Mark Mallouk wrote the screenplay for the film, which is based on the Dick Lehr/Gerald O’Neill-written bestseller "Black Mass: The True Story of an Unholy Alliance Between the FBI and the Irish Mob."

Edgerton, who is slowly becoming one of the more popular actors in Hollywood, is currently in production on Jane Got A Gun, the Gavin O'Connor-directed western that has seen more than its fair-share of behind-the-scenes drama. He has also completed work on Felony, a new Australian-produced thriller that he wrote and is starring in. In the movie he plays a decorated cop who finds his life thrown into turmoil in an instant when he has a few too many drinks and accidentally hits a bicyclist with this car. Neither film currently has a domestic release date.